The City Proved Clean Power Works for Food Carts. It Reached Ten of Twenty Thousand.

On July 7, near the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, the city's chief climate officer, Louise Yeung, stood next to a food cart that was doing something most carts in New York cannot do. It was running clean. In place of the gasoline generator that powers most of the city's mobile vendors, the cart carried a rechargeable electric battery, swapped in and out through cabinets set up inside the park by a Brooklyn company called PopWheels. The city calls the program the NYC Clean-Powered Carts Challenge. It is a six-month pilot, and the plan is to fit ten carts around the park with batteries instead of generators.